The Collins Family Bible

The Collins Family Bible

Cataloging early American bibles is often a treat; many bibles were handed down in families through generations and have family genealogical notes recorded in them, including births, deaths, and marriages. This past month we cataloged one such bible: The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments.

Trenton: Printed and sold by Isaac Collins, 1791. This bible is credited as the first Bible printed in New Jersey and the second quarto edition of the King James Bible printed in America. Isaac Collins issued the bible in various formats, with the option of including or excluding the Apocrypha or Ostervald’s “Practical observations, on the Old and New Testaments.” Ostervald’s text was sometimes left out due to objections by Baptist associations. While the Library Company has long had a copy without Ostervald’s text, this particular copy includes all of the printed text and a little something extra: family genealogical records from Isaac Collins himself. Inscribed “Isaac Collins’s book 1791 to 1817,” the manuscript notes in this book follows Collins’ family through four generations. Beginning with Isaac Collins, it passed through his family to his son, grandson, and great-granddaughter. Entries range in date from 1746 to 1921. Of particular interest to us at the Library Company, Isaac Collins’ son married Margaret Morris, a member of the prominent Philadelphian Morris family.

While our Marriott C. Morris Collection of photographic negatives and photographs does not contain any images of Collins’ direct descendants listed in this bible, we are still excited to have another book with interests that cross collections. Not only is this bible an interesting bit of New Jersey history, but the family histories it traces add depth to our existing scholarship. Truly a wonderful item to add to our collection!

The Library Company Celebrates Gay History Month!

The Library Company’s Gay History Month event—a highlight of the fall calendar—featured University of Tulsa professor Don James Brown, who made the case that Sarah Orne Jewett’s 1885 novel A Marsh Island was the first gay American novel. Jewett—herself in a same-sex relationship when the novel appeared— is often hailed as a local colorist for her portrayals of Maine communities. In A Marsh Island, the main character, a painter from New York City, spends extended time with a rural family while he recuperates from an injury. Dr. Brown noted the multitude of elements which would have signaled to the late 19th-century reader that the young man is gay, starting with his incompatibility with rural living (“queer metronormativity”). We are intrigued, and happy to have a copy of the book on our shelves.

We had a full house for the event. Among the many people who attended was Todd Snovel, the Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Commission on LGBTQ Affairs. Mr. Snovel brought greetings from Harrisburg and at the beginning of the program read, in part, Governor Wolf’s proclamation designating October 2018 as LGBTQ History Month.

Thanks to our partnership with the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the Library Company’s new Charlotte Cushman Society, we can look forward to planning Gay History Month events in future years. To support our ongoing work encouraging the study of LGBT history, please become a member of the Charlotte Cushman Society. Contact Raechel Hammer, Chief of Development, at rhammer@librarycompany.org or 215-546-3181 x142 to learn more. Or click here to donate now.

Celebrating Ten Years of the Visual Culture Program

On October 5, 2018, the Visual Culture Program (VCP) happily marked its tenth anniversary by hosting the William Birch and the Complexities of American Visual Culture symposium. Established in 2008, VCP fosters the creative use of historic visual material for the study of the past. The Program seeks to facilitate events that confront, explore, and complicate the social construction of what we see, how we see it, and why we see it as we do.

In this spirit, the symposium, in collaboration with the recently closed Library Company exhibition William Birch, Ingenious Artist, explored the visual, cultural, and social themes elicited from the work of the immigrant Philadelphia artist William Birch (1755-1834). Supported by the Center for American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Terra Foundation for American Art, Complexities facilitated multiple dialogues that reflected broadly on the continual resonance in American visual culture of the work of this premier enamel miniaturist, aspiring gentleman, and artist of the first American view books.

Art historian Wendy Bellion started off the presentations with her spirited keynote address Then and Now: How William Birch Matters in 2018. Bellion’s talk challenged our historical and contemporary understanding of Birch as an immigrant artist whose Philadelphia views continue to foster multiple interrelationships between different graphic mediums. The day of vivid and insightful discussions continued as the speakers – art historians, curators, and media artists – further explored Birch’s professional networks as an architect and landscape painter, as well as themes of “liveliness,” urban and commercial aesthetics, critical looking, and artistic innovation.

The Library Company would like to thank the Center for American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Michael Leja and the Terra Foundation for American Art for their generous support of the symposium. Without their funding, the symposium would not have been possible.

To cap off the event, art scholar and historian Elizabeth Milroy provided final remarks. In keeping with the tone of the symposium, she reflected upon the dynamics of art making and how visual culture helps us to necessarily push the boundaries of what constitutes a visual material. The tenth anniversary of VCP could not have ended more auspiciously.

Shareholder Spotlight: William Swaim

Are you feeling fatigued, or have aches and pains? Do you have nervous ailments, or have trouble breathing? Are you breaking out in a rash? Are you at death’s door? If so, try Swaim’s Panacea!

Actually don’t, unless you like slowly being poisoned by mercury.

Of the Library Company of Philadelphia’s many distinguished historic shareholders, William Swaim (1781-1846) may be one of our most infamous. He began his career as a bookbinder, but in the 1820s switched to patent medicine, where he saw a financial opportunity. Mr. Swaim decided to market a concoction made mostly of sarsaparilla (and a touch of mercury), to his great profit and detriment of his ailing customers.

By the time Mr. Swaim (and we want to emphasize that he is not a doctor) became a Library Company shareholder in 1829, he had already been discredited by the Philadelphia Medical Society. In spite of that, he continued to accumulate wealth from his fraudulent product. The public was swayed by saturated advertising in a time when the dissemination of true information was slow.

Political Cartoons—and Political Cartoonists—at the Library Company

This fall I am delighted to lead a seminar that will highlight the extraordinary early American visual culture records at the Library Company of Philadelphia. In many respects, “Graphic Material: Early American Political Cartoons and Propaganda” takes its shape from a graduate seminar with an attendance cap to ensure an intimate, hands-on workshop. I’ll curate primary and secondary source materials that highlight the rich and textured history of political propaganda from the colonial period through the American Civil War.

But make no mistake: this isn’t your typical seminar.

Instead of looking at print or digital facsimiles of primary source records, participants will have first-hand access to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century engravings, woodcuts, and ephemera contained in the Library Company’s Political Cartoon, African Americana, and John A. McAllister collections. These are the same collection items that scholars cite in the articles and books that shape the disciplines of history, literary studies, political science, and American Studies. Moreover, because seminars are hosted at the Library Company, we can spread historical documents across tables in the reading room, project supplemental material onto a massive screen, and host (included) dinners in the library’s Logan Room.

But what makes this seminar different from previous offerings at the Library Company? Well, first off, I’m leading it, and, as the resident “innovator,” you can expect surprises. Foremost, I won’t be alone.

I am thrilled to announce that several special guests from Philadelphia cartoonist community will help us to understand the profession as it exists today and to place historical records in conversation with contemporary cartoons.

Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Signe Wilkinson, whose art you might know from the pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and Washington Post, will bookend the seminar, joining us for discussions of late-antebellum and Civil War political propaganda (scheduled for Tuesday, October 23 and Tuesday, December 4).

Dwayne Booth, perhaps better known by his nom de plume “Mr. Fish,” will participate in an election week session devoted to colonial and revolutionary visual materials (Thursday, November 8).

Finally, as we turn to the early-national period, we will welcome the award-winning, Philadelphia artist and educator Jamar Nicholas (Tuesday, November 20).

As we navigate the treacherous waters of election-year politics, my hope is that this seminar will help participants to better understand, historicize, and deconstruct the political iconography that suffuses are smartphones, televisions, and newspapers. I couldn’t have asked for a more generous, thoughtful, and accomplished slate of guests, and I, for one, cannot wait to see where this seminar leads.

Space is limited, but we still have spots open. If you aren’t already a member, registration includes a one-year share of the Library Company of Philadelphia, which carries a host of benefits, such as access to members-only receptions.

Stylish Books: Designing Philadelphia Furniture

The Library Company of Philadelphia will open a new exhibition, Stylish Books: Designing Philadelphia Furniture, on November 2, 2018. Curated by Curator of Arts & Artifacts and Reference Librarian, Linda August, Stylish Books will run through April 26, 2019.

Printed designs spread new ideas. Artisans, as well as their patrons, relied on books as a way to learn about the latest fashions in interior decoration. Philadelphia became a center for creating stylish furniture. The Library Company played a role by acquiring architecture and design books, which its members, who included cabinetmakers, frequently read and used. On display will be items spanning the 18th through 19th century. Highlights will include: Thomas Chippendale’s book, A Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director; the only known copy of the tradecard of Benjamin Randolph (who was a Library Company member); and colorful plates by Désiré Guilmard, who inspired Philadelphia cabinetmaker George Henkels.

The Library Company will host an opening reception for Stylish Books November 2, 2018, from 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm. Additional programming for the exhibition includes a tour of the Center for Art in Wood (November 7, 2018), an author talk and book launch with Jay Robert Stiefel (December 10, 2018) for his new book, The Cabinetmaker’s Account: John Head’s Record of Craft and Commerce in Colonial Philadelphia, 1718-1753 (in partnership with the American Philosophical Society and the Athenaeum of Philadelphia), a curator-led gallery tour (January 16, 2019), a special collection review led by the Curator of Arts and Artifacts, Linda August (January 22, 2019), and a half-day symposium (April 3, 2019).

The Library Company would like to thank the current sponsors for the exhibition and programs including the Center for American Art, Jay Robert Stiefel, and Freeman’s. Sponsorship opportunities are still available and will support the exhibition and related programs. Click here for more information.

The Library Company of Philadelphia Receives Project Grant from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage

We are proud to announce a new initiative, Redrawing History: Indigenous Perspectives on Colonial America, funded by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. In June 2018, the Library Company was awarded a $300,000 grant to commission a new graphic novel and exhibition that will re-contextualize 18th-century historic events from the perspective of indigenous communities.

Native American artists—illustrator Weshoyot Alvitre of the Tongva people and writer Lee Francis from the Laguna Pueblo—will collaborate on the novel, drawing from previously unexamined materials in the library’s collection, such as diary entries, letters, and political cartoons.

The artists will reference “The Digital Paxton”—a web-based humanities archive produced by Dr. Will Fenton, a former Library Company Fellow and now the Creative Director of Redrawing History—to retell the little-known story of the 1763 massacre, by armed settlers, of the Conestoga Tribe in Paxton Township, near what is present-day Harrisburg, PA. Native Realities Press, the preeminent publisher of Native American comics, will publish the novel and distribute it to more than 550 federally-recognized tribes. The book will also include a curriculum to facilitate its use in high school classrooms. The accompanying exhibition at the Library Company will feature Alvitre’s illustrations, alongside artifacts and materials from the library’s collection and is planned to open November 2019.

Digital Paxton: Something New, Something Old

You may already know that Digital Paxton will serve as a companion to the graphic novel, exhibition, and educators’ institute that the Library Company of Philadelphia pursues through Redrawing History: Indigenous Perspectives on Colonial America. What you might not know is that the project has evolved—and continues to evolve—in its own right. In this post, I’ll look back at the past 18 months since the project launched in order to highlight some milestones and to identify some future opportunities.

Launching Digital Paxton

Digital Paxton opened for business in April 2017 alongside my (modest) exhibition at the Library Company of Philadelphia, “A New Looking-Glass for the 1764 Paxton Pamphlet War,” and a Friday seminar (with Scott Paul Gordon) at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

Today, both of those platforms endure online: I translated the exhibition into a digital pathway, which locates the Paxton massacre in a larger crisis of indigenous dispossession and democratic representation, and published an expanded version of my McNeil talk through Common-place: the journal early American life (17.4: Summer 2017).

Certainly, the project had generous attention in its early days. NYCDH, the New York Metropolitan Digital Humanities Consortium, awarded the project first prize in its Graduate Student Project Awards (2016-17), and the Philadelphia Inquirer published a generous write-up of the project (January 2017). However, given that the project was already fairly mature as a digital collection and scholarly edition, my primary priority for the first year was to get it out into the world through various forms of public engagement.

Sharing Digital Paxton

I spent the rest of 2017 working to promote the project through a range of different venues. I presented the project at digital humanities venues, most notably Keystone DH (July 2017), a Mellon-funded workshop on digital publishing at Lehigh University (September 2017), and a

panel on the future of the dissertation at the MLA Connected Academics Summer Institute (September 2017). I also promoted the project within the regional GLAM community through remarks at the Philadelphia Archives Month (October 2017) and the Library Company of Philadelphia Annual Dinner (November 2017).

Alongside those public talks, a collaboration with Benjamin Bankhurst (Shepherd University) and Kyle Roberts (Loyola University) brought new educational possibilities to the project. Thanks to a partnership with Bankhurst and Roberts on a transcription assignment built the project’s Friendly Association records, Digital Paxton gained new, student-created transcriptions. In the process, we also developed a platform and documentation through which other faculty may create similar assignments.

Further Expansions

While much of my free time between the fall of 2017 and spring of 2018 was spent grant-writing for our proposal with The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, the project has continued to grow in meaningful ways. First, thanks to a Digital Collections Fellowship from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, I was able to digitize some two-dozen issues of the Pennsylvania Gazette available at the American Antiquarian Society. Those new records have opened up an entirely new pathway in the project’s Digital Collection (newsprint), and for the first time make the Gazette accessible to researchers outside of the Readex paywall, as I discuss in a post for the Uncommon Sense blog (June 2018).

Also in the summer of 2018, I highlighted the project’s functionality as a teaching platform on the Organization for American Historians blog (May 2018) and as a digital collection at HILT 2018 (University of Pennsylvania, June 2018).

Readers can expect a range of new primary and secondary source materials to be added to the project in the coming months. Follow us on social media (Twitter or Facebook) or bookmark this blog for all the latest updates!

Digital Paxton: An Origin Story

Dawkins, Henry. The Paxton Expedition: Inscribed to the Author of the Farce (Philadelphia: 1764).

I discovered the 1764 Paxton pamphlet war by way of the 60-year-old edition that graces just about every bibliography: John Raine Dunbar’s The Paxton Papers (1957). I approached the Paxton massacre as neither an historian nor a Philadelphian. (I had studied early American literature in New York.)

However, as Edward White, James Myers, and Scott Gordon have demonstrated, these records present a bounty for literary scholars eager to explore their diverse forms and idiosyncratic rhetorical techniques. Researchers will discover dialogues and epitaphs, poems and songs, satires and farces flourished with evocations of “White Christian Savages,” troops of “Dutch Butchers,” and Quakers “thirsting for the Blood” of opponents.

Furthermore, as I dug deeper into the rich Paxton materials available at the Library Company of Philadelphia, I came to appreciate how much of the incident isn’t accessible in Dunbar’s edition and cannot be evaluated within the narrow frame of the pamphlet war.

To be fair, Dunbar was bound by the form of his edition. Tallying 400 pages, The Paxton Papers is a significant—and substantive—scholarly edition. But what if one wasn’t bound by the constraints of print? What else might we choose to include in twenty-first century Paxton Papers?

Digital Paxton begins to answer that question, and, in the process, it both unsettles the conventions of a scholarly edition and blurs the boundaries between an edition, a collection, and a teaching tool.

I began work on Digital Paxton in the spring of 2016. While this project was my idea, it simply would not be a reality without the records, expertise, and institutional investments of my founding partners, the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. I traveled to Philadelphia as a grad student with a wild idea. Both institutions took a chance and invested in it.

Thanks to a modest travel grant from my university (Fordham University), I shuttled between New York and Philadelphia half a dozen times that spring to participate in planning.

Over the first half of 2016, I created design mockups so that we could test different approaches for presenting and structuring data, drafted memoranda of understanding to delimit roles, responsibilities, and sustainability plans, and worked closely with Librarian Jim Green to identify the most suitable pamphlets, broadsides, political cartoons, and manuscripts available at both institutions. Samantha Miller from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and Nicole Joniec from the Library Company helped me to develop a set of inter-institutional standards for scanning, naming conventions, and rights to long-term digital storage. Perhaps most importantly, each institution funded a summer intern who scanned and transcribed items for Digital Paxton. Before Grace Tang and Hunter Johnson began their assignments in late-June, I worked with Nicole Scalessa from the Library Company to draft a work plan, a spreadsheet through which we could track progress, and a document to which we could add full-text transcriptions.

That first batch of material—1,152 pages in sum—represents nearly one-half of all material available in Digital Paxton. About half of that original corpus was transcribed and fully-searchable, with all images were made publicly available as print-quality 300-dpi JPEGs. Under the Creative Commons 4.0 license, any researcher, student, teacher, or inquisitive visitor can download, use, or reuse images as they wish.

Over the past two years, the project has expanded remarkably as a digital collection. Digital Paxton features almost 2,500 pages as of material, which now includes diaries and letters from LancasterHistory.org and the Moravian Archives of Bethlehem; never-before digitized manuscripts from the American Philosophical Society; treaty minutes from Haverford College Quaker and Special Collections and Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts; and newsprint from the American Antiquarian Society. The project is proud to host contributions from more than a dozen archives, libraries, and cultural institutions, with more than one-third of the digital collection fully-transcribed and searchable (88 records as of September 2018).

Perhaps most importantly, the project has blossomed as a scholarly edition. While Digital Paxton, like Dunbar’s Paxton Papers, features an editor’s introduction, the definitiveness of my framework is complicated by ten additional historical overviews and conceptual keyword essays. For example, Darvin Martin explores the “History of Conestoga Indiantown,” whereas Scott Paul Gordon teases out the complexities of the oft-repeated charge against “Elites.”

The project’s interpretative apparatus is self-consciously interdisciplinary: essays explore the historical bases and literary and material cultures of the Paxton massacre and pamphlet war. Essays are also admirably succinct, written and edited to serve as on-ramps to the project’s digital collection. That is, Digital Paxton interweaves text and context so that visitors can pursue their interests, wherever those curiosities might lead.

Digital Paxton is perhaps most embryonic as a teaching platform. The project hosts several assignments that encourage students to delve into the history of European colonization, to inhabit perspectives of the Paxton allies and their opponents, and to practice paleography through transcription. While those lessons are tailored to higher education, we have some exciting plans to translate the project for middle and high school classrooms. Certainly the graphic novel that we publish via Redrawing History: Indigenous Perspectives on Colonial America will be central to that process. However, the graphic novel is just one leg in an (expanding) educational base.

I hope that interested readers will return to this site to track Digital Paxton’s maturation as a teaching tool, a digital collection, and a scholarly edition.

What does it mean to Redraw History?

Needs a Caption

In December 1763, a mob of settlers from Paxtang Township murdered 20 unarmed Susquehannock Indians in Lancaster County. A month later, hundreds of “Paxton Boys” marched toward Philadelphia to menace and possibly kill more refugee Indians who sought the protection of the Pennsylvania government. While Benjamin Franklin halted the march just outside of Philadelphia in Germantown, supporters of the Paxton Boys and their critics spent the next year battling in print through a pamphlet war that was not so different from the Twitter wars of today.

For historians, the Paxton massacre(s) and ensuing pamphlet war are well-trodden territory. In 2013, Daniel Richter (McNeil Center for Early American Studies) organized a 250th anniversary conference, from which Patrick Spero (American Philosophical Society) edited a special issue of Early American Studies in 2016. And, of course, the de facto edition to the ensuing pamphlet war, John Raine Dunbar’s The Paxton Papers (1957) recently marked its 60th anniversary.

However, as I began to build my own digital collection and scholarly edition to that pamphlet war (Digital Paxton), I was struck by how much of that debate unfolded outside of pamphlets. Alongside a wealth of other printed materials—newsprint, books, broadsides, and political cartoons—I discovered dozens of diaries, letters, and treaty minutes that not only placed the massacre in a longer debate about colonial settlement, democratic representation, and racial identification, but also unsettled the singular authority of those colonial records. For example, the political cartoon “Franklin and the Quakers” doesn’t make a lot of sense without some understanding of Quaker-Indian diplomacy (via the Friendly Association) during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). Furthermore, the more I dug into those diplomatic records, the more I reckoned with the difficulty of discerning voices of Delaware, Lenni Lenape, or Susquehannock (Conestoga) that were not excerpted or mediated through their colonial trading partners.

In the case of Digital Paxton, I’ve tried to surface those absences by placing colonial and indigenous records in the same repository (digital collection), signposting archival gaps through contextual essays, such as Darvin Martin’s “History of Conestoga Indiantown.” But what if we could imagine a perspective on the Paxton massacre that, given the genocide of the Susquehannock, could not be retrieved? That is, what if, instead of telling a story about the Paxton vigilantes, we sought to tell a story about the Conestoga, their resilience, and their formative role in the history of the colony of Pennsylvania?

Redrawing History: Indigenous Perspectives on Colonial America takes up that challenge. Supported by a major grant to the Library Company of Philadelphia by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, this project features three key components: an educational graphic novel, a national educators’ seminar, and an exhibition, accompanied by a series of public programs.

The graphic novel is central to this project because it will empower indigenous creative partners to explore, question, and reinterpret—or “redraw”—historical records accessible through Digital Paxton. In addition to an advisory board comprised of subject area specialists from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Free Library of Philadelphia, and University of Pennsylvania (including, notably, Daniel Richter, who organized of the 250th anniversary conference), the project also includes leadership from the Delaware Tribe and local indigenous communities at the Circle Legacy Center.

Notably, the graphic novel will be written, illustrated, and published by Native American artists: Dr. Lee Francis (Laguna Pueblo) will write the script; Weshoyot Alvitre (Tongva) will pencil, ink, and color pages; and Native Realities Press will publish the graphic novel with free distribution to all 573 federally-recognized tribes. As Creative Director of the project, I’m a sort of air traffic controller: I’ll queue up scholars, scholarship, and historical records, make new primary and secondary source materials freely accessible on Digital Paxton, and seek new opportunities to connect our book with the broader public. This requires a great deal of restraint from an academic, where working alone is all too common, but I’m thrilled to see what emerges from this scholarly-creative collaboration. The book will be available in fall of 2019, with free accessibility online.

Meanwhile, in the summer of 2019, the Library Company of Philadelphia will partner with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History to host a national educators’ institute. We’ll produce a teaching curriculum, keyed to common core standards, so that middle school and high school teachers at public schools have everything they need to bring our graphic novel—and the Paxton incident—into their classrooms. The curricula will be folded into the back of the graphic novel and made freely accessible online.

Finally, between the fall of 2019 and spring of 2020, I will curate an exhibition of the artwork that Alvitre creates for the graphic novel juxtaposed against the diverse historical records available at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Alongside that exhibition, we will offer a host of programs through which the public may discover the project and meet our artists and advisory board. As with the book and educational curricula, the Library Company exhibition will be free and open to public.

We’re just at the beginning of this process and more details will come into focus in the coming months. I encourage you to return to this site for all of the latest updates.

I, for one, feel humbled to play some small role in this extraordinary project. Thank you for taking the time to read this post, and thank you especially to the Library Company of Philadelphia and The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage for supporting this innovative approach to public art and humanities.